A Superior Death (27 page)

“Denny?”

“We found him,” Hawk said. “Two days before you did.

Floating near the ship. His gear was on him, there was air in his tank. Maybe ecstasy of the deep. Stupidity. Accident.

It doesn’t matter—not even if it was murder. We gave him the burial he wanted in the grave he would have chosen. We owed him at least that.”

“Howdy, howdy, howdy.” Frederick Stanton had arrived at their table. Somewhere along the way he had picked up a coffeepot, and proceeded to refill their cups. “Nothing for me, thanks,” he said when an irritated waitress steamed over to retrieve her pot.

Anna was too stunned to speak. Stanton flopped down in the chair beside Hawk and leaned back. His carefully blank eyes moved between the two of them. Anna doubted he missed a thing. Hawk began wolfing down his sandwich, his face burning red under the tan. Anna had lost what little appetite she had. The sight of egg salad nauseated her. So did the sight of Hawk.

Watching the boats come and go in the harbor, she stared out of the window. Nothing broke the silence but Hawk’s muffled chewing. Stanton had grown so good at waiting Anna scarcely even felt him there.

Twins and lovers. Denny knew. Denny was their employer, protector. Denny understood. They had risked imprisonment to give him the burial he had wanted.

Stanton caught her eye. She smiled. “Sorry to drag you all the way down here. I just wondered if the autopsy report had come back.”

The FBI man’s look of expectancy evaporated. “Ah. Well. Meet me in Ralph’s office.” Looking crestfallen, a disappointed child, he rose from the table.

Anna felt a stab of guilt. “There are some things I’d like to talk over with you.” He brightened. Anna wondered what technique he used on other people. Whatever worked, probably. “An hour okay?” She looked at her watch. “Around two-thirty?”

“Two-thirty it is.” For a moment he hovered near the table. “You going to eat that sandwich?” he said finally.

“It’s all yours.” Anna pushed the plate toward him, and he shoveled the entire sandwich onto one flat palm and wandered out, eating as he walked.

Hawk stopped chewing as abruptly as he had begun but remained staring down at his plate. “I’m sorry, Anna. We were so young. We never knew better. Then we knew better and we tried to quit. Holly broke hearts. I made a lot of women hate me. Holly and I cried and fought. I drank. Holly did coke. We’d sit across the room from each other at parties, some pretty boy panting over her, some bimbo hanging on me. It was sick, Anna, sicker a hundred times more than anything we could ever do together. Denny hired us. Out on the lake days at a time, the world kind of fades. Old rules seem like nonsense. We made new rules. Our parents are dead. We’ll never have kids. New rules for a new world. Who were we hurting?”

“Denny knew?”

“Denny was our friend.”

“Jo?”

“Nobody. Just Denny.”

“Now me.” A number of stock phrases marched across the tip of Anna’s tongue: How could you? You lied to me. You used me. But he hadn’t lied and she had used him. And to the same ends: to forget, for a moment, a love that had come to hurt more than it healed. “It’s okay,” she said.

“Is it really?” Hawk sounded as if her answer genuinely mattered to him.

“ ‘Okay’ is relative, I guess,” Anna said. “But yeah.”

CHAPTER 18

Frederick was in Ralph’s chair, tilted back, his ankles crossed atop the clutter on the desk. In the cheap suit he presented a perfect parody of the 1930 shamus. Anna couldn’t tell if it was intentional or not.

She finished her story: “So they dressed Denny in his favorite clothes, stuck him in the engine room, and left him to his eternal rest.”

“That was two days before those divers—Whosis and Bozo—discovered the body.”

“Two days.”

Stanton picked up a blue For Your Eyes Only envelope and tapped it without showing the contents to Anna. “The autopsy says Denny died the day before that.”

“Four? Four days before the Canadians found him?”

“Yup. Nobody reported him missing? Nobody wondered where he was?”

“He was on his honeymoon,” Anna replied a little defensively. “You expect people to disappear on their honeymoon.”

“Three days.”

“He died on his wedding night!” Anna realized aloud.

“You’d think the bride would have noticed,” Stanton said.

 

 

 

 

J
o was camped up on Lake Richie just southwest of Moskey Basin, working on her freshwater quality study. When Denny died, the NPS had offered her any length of leave she required to settle personal business. Jo had taken just enough time to finalize the plans for planting Denny’s body deep in Michigan’s soil where, as Holly put it one bitter evening, he could never drift away from her.

Within a couple of days Jo had been back on Isle Royale working. Anna understood. It was what she would have done. Had done, once she’d sobered up.

Jo’s camp was a two-mile hike in. The trail was muddy. Blackflies, tiny airborne carnivores called “all-jaws” by the local Michigan children, bit without warning. Mosquitoes and Frederick Stanton whined.

“Tell me about the autopsy report,” Anna said, hoping to distract him. Or hoping the bugs would’ve distracted him enough he’d accidentally tell her something worth knowing.

“Good of you to come along, Anna. Oh, ish!”

Anna looked back. Stanton was staring ruefully at one black leather shoe, brown now with mud. She laughed. “If you’re for real, you’re scary.”

He looked the offended innocent.

“The autopsy . . .” she led in.

“Dead since the seventeenth of June, four days before the Canadians discovered the body. Cause of death: drowning.”

“Drowning? With his tank nearly full?”

Stanton chuckled. “The corpse wasn’t wearing a tank.”

Anna made no comment. She walked on, listening for the rest of the report. “What about the bruises?” she asked when nothing more was forthcoming.

“You knew about that, too? Jeez, Anna. Why ask? You tell me.”

“There was a bruise across his shoulder where his harness would’ve been. He was in dive gear when he died. That’s my guess anyway.”

“Wow.” Stanton sounded genuinely impressed. “Gee, you think?”

“Occasionally.” Anna was losing patience.

“Remind me not to deal drugs in your park.”

“You don’t buy that anymore.”

Stanton neither agreed nor disagreed.

Anna stopped, turned. “Do you want to work together, or do you want to keep dicking around?”

Stanton looked at his shoes, at the canopy of aspen closing overhead. He grinned, he shrugged, he shuffled.

Anna was unimpressed. “You never bought it, did you? You just hoped by threatening to impound the
Third Sister,
you’d get somebody setting out to clear the Bradshaws. Or convict them.”

“I swear by local talent,” he said at last. “They know where the bodies are buried, who’s sleeping with whom.”

“Help me then.”

Stanton seemed to weigh the efficacy of interagency cooperation. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “Castle drowned. Water was in his lungs. If you’re right about the bruise being caused by his harness, he drowned with plenty of breathing air on him. Too weird for me.”

Anna told him about the knife. If there’d been any kind of struggle at that depth, Denny could have blacked out. His assailant could have pulled off his mouthpiece.

“Left him to wake up dead?”

“That’s what crossed my mind,” Anna said.

“Why?”

“Beats me.” She turned and began walking again, the moisture-laden thimbleberry branches slapping dark patterns on her trousers.

“Drugs,” Stanton said. “When you’ve ruled out the impossible, whatever’s left, however improbable, is drugs.”

“One-size-fits-all motive?”

“It’s perfect,” Stanton said, and: “Damn!” The sound of slapping, a mosquito or blackfly departing the quick and joining the dead. “I’m all for drugs,” he babbled on. “Takes the guesswork out of law enforcement.”

 

 

 

T
hey found Jo’s camp on a rocky bluff overlooking Lake Richie. Set like an orange Easter egg amid the froth of wild sarsaparilla, her tent was pitched on the hardened site.

Frederick crawled halfway inside. “Not searching,” he called out. “Can’t search without a warrant. Checking for guns and bombs. Officer safety.”

Anna sat down on a rock screened by Juneberry bushes where she could see the trail that wound up from the lake. Search finished, Stanton came and curled his long body neatly down beside her, hugging his bony knees to his chest. Despite his grumbling the hike hadn’t even winded him.

“Do you think Jo killed Denny?” Anna asked impulsively.

“The spouse is always a prime suspect.”

“Better than drugs?”

“Nothing’s better than drugs.”

“No more profiles. Do you, personally, think Jo did it?”

“I don’t think,” Stanton replied solemnly. “I’m a government employee.”

Anna gave up. His reticence had ceased to amuse or challenge. It merely irritated.

Out in the lake, silver rings were beginning to appear on the blue, fish rising to eat their suppers. Soon Jo Castle would be returning. Anna ran scenes in her head: Jo, jealous, following or luring Denny down on the
Kamloops
for a midnight dive on the night of their wedding; a struggle, a death. Maybe Jo had found, despite the marriage, Denny still pursued Donna. Maybe she had killed them both.

The story didn’t feel right. The knife: Anna couldn’t picture Denny defending himself from his wife with a knife. The location: too difficult to execute a planned murder, and without words, what could ignite that kind of passion under two hundred feet of water?

Still, in Anna’s mind, the greatest argument against Joas-killer had nothing to do with clues or evidence. Jo Castle lacked passion. She was a trudger. If Denny was unfaithful, Jo was more the type to outlive the mistress than kill the mister. It was why she had finally won Denny, and why it had taken her twenty years to do it.

A figure, humpbacked like a forest gnome, appeared on the trail at the far end of the lake. “That’ll be Jo,” Anna said. “I recognize the pack.”

“Shh,” Stanton returned. “Sound carries across water.”

His oversized face was hard with concentration. The angles of his usually gawky body were knifelike.

The distant figure disappeared into the trees. Frederick and Anna waited. She felt as if she were sitting by a crouching lion. She had an irrational urge to holler and warn Jo away.

Twenty minutes passed. The lake was absolutely still, a perfect mirror. Across the water, two backpackers had dumped their gear against a tree and were wading in the shallows. Muted, indecipherable, their conversation floated up to the bluff. A crunching from the trail: footsteps. With no more warning than that, Jo Castle walked into the clearing.

“Hi.” She seemed unsurprised and disinterested, as if most evenings law enforcement agents were waiting in camp for her.

Anna remembered that apathy. The dullness that followed had, in some ways, been harder to bear than the pain. It came when one accepted the death as fact: immutable, forever. Then, for a while, the world no longer held any wonder. Anna wanted to tell Jo if she lived through this, life would get better. But it was not a good time.

Jo dropped the pack with a thud. It weighed close to a hundred pounds.

“I’m Frederick Stanton,” the FBI man said. He moved easily between Jo and the pack. Officer safety. “We talked a week or so ago.”

“I remember.” Jo looked around as if for a place to sit, didn’t see one and lost interest. “Do you guys want coffee or something?”

“Nothing,” Stanton said as she moved toward the tent.

“We came to talk with you about the death of your husband.”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you sit down, Jo? Sit here by me.” Anna patted the rock. Obediently, Jo came over. Stanton shot Anna a look of professional annoyance and Anna guessed he meant to keep Jo standing, literally and figuratively, alone and unsupported. Anna didn’t care. “You were saying, Frederick?” she said helpfully.

Stanton waited, letting the sarcasm clear from the air. “When did your husband die, Mrs. Castle?” It was not so much a question as a demand for information. Irritation nibbled at Anna’s self-control. Officer Stanton was seldom what he seemed. He preferred circuitous routes, but he usually got where he was going.

“When?” he repeated.

“Anna and Lucas told me Denny . . . Denny’s body . . . had been found on the twenty-second of June. I’m pretty sure it was the twenty-second. I was . . . What was I doing, Anna?”

“Not when did you hear, Mrs. Castle,” Stanton pressed.

“When did he die?”

Jo turned to Anna as if for help. Anna looked sympathetic but still said nothing. Jo turned back to Stanton. “I don’t know,” she said distinctly.